In a letter of 5 April 1824 to the Reverend John Tucker Thomas Arnold asks his friend, "Have you seen Cobbett's 'History of the Protestant Reformation,' which he is publishing monthly in threepenny numbers?"

It is a queer compound of wickedness and
ignorance with strong sense and the mention of divers
truths which have been too much disguised or kept in the
back ground, but which ought to be generally known. Its
object is to represent the Reformation in England as a
great national evil, accomplished by all kinds of robbery
and cruelty, and tending to the impoverishment and misery
of the poor, and to the introduction of a careless clergy
and a spirit of ignorance and covetousncss amongst every
body. It made me groan, while reading it, to think that
the real history and effects of the Reformation are so little
known, and the evils of the worldly policy of Somerset's
and Elizabeth's government so little appreciated. As it
is, Cobbett's book can do nothing but harm, so bad is its
spirit, and so evident its unfairness.
[I, 77-78]

This letter reveals Arnold's basic fairness and open-mindedness, for even while
intensely disliking much of what Cobett has to say, he finds himself forced to agree that his points about the rapacious side of the Reformation in England and the bad effects upon the poor. Cobett made an important impression, and he brings him up again in a letter written from Florence on 15 July 1825 to another friend, the Rev. George Cornish, when he tells him that he is trying to obtain sound information about the condition of

the lower orders. I have
long had a suspicion that Cobbett's complaints of the degradation and sufferings of the poor in England contained much truth, though uttered by him in the worst possible spirit, it is certain that the peasantry here are much more
generally proprietors of their own land than with us; and
I should believe them to be much more independent and
in easier circumstances. This is, I believe, the grand
reason why so many of the attempts at revolution have
failed in these countries. A revolution would benefit the
lawyers, the savans [sic], the merchants, bankers, and shopkeepers, but I do not see what the labouring classes would gain by it. For them the work has been done already, in the destruction of the feudal tyranny of the nobility and
great men. [I, 78]

Arnold continues, sounding amazingly like a modern revolutionary, by approving of the French Revolution and all its violence, for, as he explains, "this blessing is enough to compensate the evils of the French Revolution; for the good endures, while the effects of the massacres and devastations are fast passing away" (78-79). Arnold continues to surprise us by adding that, unlike so many other Victorians, such as Pugin, Carlyle, and Ruskin, who saw the Middle Ages as a wonderful time, he finds nothing but good in signs of its destruction. "It is my delight everywhere," he writes Cornish,

to see the feudal castles in ruins, never, I trust, to be rebuilt or reoccupied; and in this respect the watchword 'Guerre aux châteaux, Paix aux Chaumières,' was
prophetic of the actual result of the French Revolution.
I am sure that we have too much of the oligarchical spirit
in England, both in church and state; and I think that
those one-eyed men, the political economists, encourage
this by their language about national wealth, &c. Toute-fois, there is much good in the oligarchical spirit as it exists
in England

References

Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., late head-master of Rugby school, and regius professor of modern history in the University of Oxford. 4th ed. 2 vols. London: B. Fellowes, 1845.